Note, this is a reupload. I preferred the audio of this version, so that's the main reason I decided to reupload it. I’ll still leave the previous video up as unlisted, so as to not break any external links with it. Sorry about any inconvenience!
What a lovely man is John Passmore. A brilliant philosopher and his book on Hume is a necessity when studying David Hume. Such a excellent discourse betwwen these two men.
There's not many giants of philosophy we English speakers get to read in their original language without the buffer of translation, but boy how lucky we are that Hume is one of them. The Treatise is a delightful read, really changed my life.
I sudied Hume a little in 1974 at Yale. I remember only two things:(1) we can only know constant conjunctions not the real [logical] causes of things, and (2) he suffered a painful death and remained true to his skepticism to the end. Both have been inspiring to me hre in USA ever since.
So nice to find this clever, knowledgable, and detailed conversation about Hume. I'm reading his A Treatise of Human Nature, Volume 1, right now. This is very helpful.
If I’ve understood Hume’s point right, it is a limitation on human perception but not the kind that could be helped with the use of technological aids, and especially not cameras. The key part of Hume’s account of impressions that makes his skepticism about causality tick is the claim that all our perceptions are serial. In other words, Hume advances an atomistic view of perception, where experience is supposed to be analyzable into primitives or simples called impressions. Each impression is supposed to be a distinct perceiving from the impression that immediately preceded it, so that when we drop the ball we perceive a series of impressions where the ball falls from our hand, moves through the air, hits the ground, and comes back into the air. And we observe from repeating this sequence a few hundred times that the dropping of the ball is temporally prior to the ball hitting the ground and coming back up. Or said differently, the ball “habitually” bounces up when we drop it. But all we’ve perceived is a collection of particular instances of the behavior of this particular object, and that in the form of these momentary atomistic perceptions. We never receive an impression of a cause qua cause. Rather, we have to infer causes based on the “habitual conjunctions” of two events and any observations we can make about qualities of the ball. Causality belongs in the realm of “relations of ideas” rather than “matters of fact.” I think it might be clear why a piece of technology like a camera that actually does record information frame-by-frame doesn’t help us much here. Where one can plausibly argue with Hume about whether our perceptual experience is serial or analyzable into simple units, or whether it is perhaps in some sense Gestalt or otherwise non-serial, it is plainly the case that cameras do record images in a serial manner and play them back too quickly for us to see the disjunctions.
I found Prof. Magee's statements to be a lot more clear than the responses of Prof. Passmore, which quite often did not clearly address the specific issue highlighted by the questioner (Prof. Magee). As an example, Prof. Magee brought up the notion of "self" and asked how David Hume treated that. This is a very profound question, one that the great Buddhist masters including the Buddha himself and Nagarjuna, later, had discussed in depth. I found that Prof. Passmore was non-responsive. In fact, I am surprised that none of the Humean scholars seem to recognize the influence that Nagarjuna (and the Buddhist philosophers) had on David Hume.
How very interesting Ravi. I didnt know this. Having studied Hume and the History of Philosophy I wish I had knowlege at the time of Buddist Philosophy. If I remember correctly the Philosopher Schopenhaur studied and was heavily influenced by Buddist thought.
@@yvonneheald6456 It is interesting to think about how Hume came to be exposed to the Buddhist system. One obviously plausible link is that the father of skeptic school Pyrrho himself - who went to Afghanistan/India in 4th century BC with Alexander the Great and learnt from the Buddhist masters. Another possibility that I recently came across was that while he was in La Fleche, France, Hume was exposed to the writings/notes of the Jesuit scholars who had studied in Tibet. In either case, I am quite convinced that Hume's skepticism and his views on the emptiness of the self were mightily influenced by the Buddhist thought, just as Schopenhauer's (and Kant's) thoughts were, as you had correctly pointed out.
@@frankduval3031 Those two sentences are contradictory, but the bigger question is: Do you disbelieve that biological organisms change over time based on recombinations and mutations in their DNA? That's as close to a scientifically proven fact as gravity. Do you not believe in gravity either? And what do you believe instead? Are you an ultimate sceptic, suspending all beliefs about anything? If so, then why single out evolution here? Or are you trying to defend intelligent design of biological organisms? - something that Hume was sceptical about, so I don't see how he would help you with that.
@@sttthr the two sentences are not contradictory. The evolution is tenable because we can't prove that it happened in the first place and evolutionists can't prove that it happened because of the reasons they proclaim it happened. Hence, this theory is just a habit.
